On the morning of October 07, the 50th anniversary of the Doomsday War, Hamas militants infiltrated Israel's territories bordering the Gaza Strip, engaging in hostilities with IDF units.
More than 1000 Israelis have died, about 2,500 are in hospitals in the country. Fierce fighting continues between militants and the regular Israeli army. More than 3,000 rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip, and Hamas militants are committing numerous war crimes in Israel: shooting at vehicles carrying Israeli civilians evacuating from Israel's border areas with the Gaza Strip, killing IDF soldiers who have surrendered, abusing women, and seeking to capture as many civilians as possible who are being taken to Gaza. Israel has not known this scale of invasion and collateral damage since 1973 - the specter of a major war looming in the Middle East is extremely profitable for Russia, which is directly complicit in the bloodshed that has begun. Putin hopes that U.S. military aid to Israel will force Washington to shift its attention away from Ukraine, the main target of Russia's war of conquest.
Russia and Palestine have had a close relationship since Soviet times. Interested in promoting its influence among the Arab world, the USSR explicitly called Israel "an accomplice of Western imperialism" and the activities of the Palestinians "a national liberation movement." And modern Russia, which claims to be the successor of the USSR, is directly interested in destabilizing Israel, which can be provoked with the help of Hamas, which is not considered a terrorist organization in Russia.
Thus, from 2015 to 2020, 7 official meetings were held between the top leadership of the Russian Foreign Ministry and Hamas. In addition, Russia is literally flooding the Gaza Strip with various types of weapons, in particular, ATGMs, supplying such weapons through Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. It should be noted that Putin has been directly supporting Hamas since the early 2000s with sales of small arms and helicopters. In his perception, cooperation with this organization had a specific purpose: to strengthen Russia's geopolitical position in the Middle East with a parallel weakening of similar positions of the United States. The saturation of the Gaza Strip with Russian arms was sooner or later to lead to a conflict that began on October 07 - Putin benefits from a large-scale conflict in the Middle East in order to divert the attention of the international community from the war in Ukraine.
The contours of the emerging conflict become clearer if we consider the importance of the Middle East in terms of world politics and economy. The interests of the United States, China, Iran, Russia, Turkey and a number of countries of the Arabian Peninsula intersect in this region. A local conflict between Israel and Palestine, started by the latter, is capable of starting a war that has every chance of becoming World War III. Especially, taking into account the presence of nuclear weapons in many of the above-mentioned countries. Shifting US attention to its strategic ally Israel will open a window of opportunity for Russia to escalate the situation in Ukraine. A large-scale conflict in the Middle East could also trigger a geopolitical "domino effect" that would exacerbate the issue of China's invasion of Taiwan and Russia's threats against the Baltic States and the Caucasus. Such a development is capable of dealing a blow to the strategic interests of the US and the West on the world stage.
Israel, on the other hand, risks a war that will put at stake the preservation of its statehood - a number of neighboring countries unfriendly to Jerusalem may well take aggressive actions in case of outright failures of the IDF. Thus, the Lebanese Hezbollah has declared that in the event of a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army, it will undertake an invasion of the northern regions of Israel. One should not forget the factor of Iran, which is a traditional ally of the Shiite Hezbollah and its probable involvement in this conflict.
Logically, the geopolitical turbulence resulting from another Palestinian-Israeli conflict is undoubtedly beneficial to Russia. It is not surprising that Russian media resources are closely following the course of hostilities and do not hide their sympathies for Hamas and its allies.
Source: 24Brussels.online
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